Even near the large city of New York, where some men pay the interest on land worth five thousand dollars per acre for the sake of tilling it for market-gardening purposes, there are thousands of acres of ground utterly neglected year after year, as they have been for the past twenty years. It is possible that some of these might have been tilled to profit, but, with a steady demand for labor in the cities for which sure and frequent pay is guaranteed, the farmer’s sons and daughters left their home, and the father was left without assistance and without means to hire help. Even had he hired it, the results would have been the same--the balance on the wrong side at the end of the year.
Frequently the suggestion is made that the farmers should receive a bounty from the Government or from his State on special products, and this system, so far as individual States are concerned, is in partial operation. The farmer himself is distinctly of the opinion that, while legislation provides special relief and assistance for nearly every other class in the industrial world, he should not be neglected. When he begins to demand such assistance, as he is now quite willing to do, there will be before the public a question of greater magnitude than any labor problem which has yet appeared. Special legislation has an unpopular sound, but the fact exists, as any follower of Congressional and legislative proceedings well knows.
The granger movement in the West was the initial of this attempt at improving the farmer’s condition. Like other great popular movements, it began with a sudden impulse, in which there was more earnestness than intelligence; yet any observer of the necessities of the farmer and the management of the railways knows that there was a substantial basis of sense to it. For a great many years the railways took the lion’s share of the farm’s yield, on the plea that it cost that proportion of the value of the crop to move corn or wheat or pork to market. Why it took so large an amount is well known in the case of many roads, which by watering their stock or subsidizing construction companies were capitalized at several times their value. In the future efforts of the farmer to secure recognition and proper compensation for his service, the factors of the problem may not be so distinct, but, unless something is done in the direction of legislative assistance, the farms of the West must in time be deserted as largely as those of the eastern States, in which there are now thousands of farms in which not only the land, but the buildings, are without occupants, and are at the service of anyone who may be fool enough to occupy them--that is the farmer’s way of putting it.